Tony van BÃ¼Ã¼ren van Heijst

Tony van Büüren van Heijst is a senior pre-sales consultant at OutSystems, responsible for supporting OutSystems customers, prospects, and partners in Northern Europe. Tony specializes in advising organizations on how to apply Agile technologies to develop processes and effective SOA infrastructures. With more than 15 years of experience in IT development, he has been involved in multiple aspects of the application lifecycle as a consultant, project manager and now pre-sales.

Our next presentation was by Stefan Meier, Associate Director, Software
Development, Information Sciences Department at XDx. Xdx is a biotech company
that relies on software and technology for their Molecular Diagnostic
Technology. They assess patients who have had a heart transplant and whether
they are likely to accept or reject the transplant. They are also working on
a clinical study to provide the data to find correlations between genetics
and pathology in disease/immune system-related areas.
Prior to Agile & OutSystems - the development team was 5 developers and 2 SQA
and 1 project manager using classical waterfall methods - with 3 Web-based
EDC systems for clinical trials, 2 internally developed LIMS applications (1
FDA regulated), several custom query/reporting/maintenance applications and
Excel spreadsheets for reporting.
One key problem Stefan highlighted ... (more)

Recently industry analysts, press, and bloggers have been writing about the
state of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and whether it's "dead" or in
the "trough of disillusionment."
These discussions have been fueled by surveys that suggest a decline in the
number of organizations considering SOA, or that organizations have
evaluated, but decided to shelve SOA for the time being. Or, even worse, that
after an initial investment in implementing SOA architectures, organizations
have been unable to capitalize on these investments.
So, what's happening? What were these companies ex... (more)

Last week, I attended Forrester's IT Forum in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. In
looking back over my notes I wanted to share some of the highlights. The
first keynote started off with the resounding words: "Never Waste a Good
Crisis". Bobby Cameron, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester
expanded on this notion it appeared that the main point is that during a
crisis change tends to be accelerated which should allow those savvy IT
organizations to address these key challenges:
• How do I get leaner and reduce IT waste?
• How do I protect and promote innovation?
• How do... (more)

Hugo Sousa, IT Director of Turismo de Portugal, started out by sharing with
the audience his commitment to the business goals of Turismo de Portugal. For
that, he showed us his project goals:
Measure and get 90% satisfaction People are all that matters Do IT better
This is a very important change in IT, where usually the metrics are measured
in bandwidth and server uptime!
Hugo pointed out that to do this IT Governance was a must. But because the
rules can change and need to be adapted, Hugo stated that what he really
needed was Agile IT Governance. After looking at several pr... (more)

In this NextStep session Pedro Rosa Santos who leads the consulting services
team for Keep it Simple, an OutSystems Partner, addressed how Dynamic
Business Applications can play a big part in the Insurance industry.
Pedro described the quantum leap experienced in the Insurance industry from
2005-2008 as it tried to deal with market demand for new products, online
self service, the need for real-time information exchange with agent & broker
channels and the drive to invest in new technology in order to reduce costs.
The problem, Pedro explains, is that this has created an extremely ... (more)